Things to know about Miami and flying

HistoryMiami Museum tour

Miami can literally be called the birthplace of modern aviation and commercial air traffic.

Air business was born for mail delivery, and survived with the infusion of money and training needs of the government for the WW1 war effort.

Thanks to a fabulous tour put together by the HistoryMiami museum, I was able to spend a full day learning about the history of flight on a tour that took us from Miami Springs, to behind the scenes at MIA, to Dinner Key (where Miami City Hall is located in Pan Am's first airport).

Our guides from the history museum had the whole day synchronized perfectly. Our bus driver was excellent and had us moving fluidly through traffic, our historian Dr. George is amazing. This was my fifth tour led by Dr. Paul George tour, so I must be a groupy.

Me and Dr. George

MIA was known as "36th Street Airport" or "Pan Am Fields". Today Miami International Airport covers 3,230 acres west of downtown Miami between Northwest 36th Street, Le Jeune Road, the Palmetto Expressway and State Road 836 and is one of the busiest airports in the world. Over 44 million people traveled through the airport in 2017.

On the tarmac of MIA

in the control tower

The Glenn Curtiss mansion is now a museum and wedding venue next to the airport. Among a million other things, Curtiss owned the largest airplane manufacturing business in the 1920's, he gave the land for the current Miami International and Opalocka airports and he single handedly saved UM from going under in the 1920's. He also had over 500 inventions and 400 patents when he died at 53 years. He invented the first motorcycle and was the official "fastest man in the world" in 1907 (for going 136 mph on an 8 cylinder motorcycle). He was issued pilots' license #1 in the USA and license #2 in France. He and the Wright brothers fought notoriously, but generations later their businesses merged to continue manufacturing plane parts today (Curtiss Wright Co)!

Victor Chapman, of Chapman Field, and a road right around the corner from where I live, was the first pilot to go down in WW1 combat .

Eddie Rickenbacher was a larger than life figure in Miami. He  was the highest scoring Ace fighter pilot in WWI, and he owned Eastern airlines. He survived an eastern airlines crash into the Pacific ocean and survived for 24 days. In his older years, he was often seen as the crazy old man feeding the seagulls. But you have to know the story to appreciate why he did that. 

The pilot, Paul Tibbets on the plane called Enola Gay, (named after his mother) which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima August 6th, lived in Miami.  The second plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki was also piloted by a Bahamian Miami resident.

All the big stars worked  or flew out of Miami, including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Glenn Curtiss.

Charles Lindberg was an airplane mechanic in Miami. Later he was hired to design routes for PanAm.

Talk about self made go-getters. Juan Trippe is someone to read about. He went from being a stunt amusement park flier to starting a mail delivery service to owning the largest international carrier in the world.
Pan American Airways, the largest international carrier, worked out of Miami airport from 1927 to its collapse in 1991. The employees were like a family and they formed World Wings International to keep in touch, build on philanthropic projects and keep the memories alive.

Pan Am flight attendants shared memories at the Curtiss Mansion

The next best thing to being in the airport control tower... If you eat in the 94th Aero Squadron Restaurant that is alongside the southern runways, you can wear headphones hanging from the walls between the windows to listen to the control towers.

A day from Heaven